diff --git a/locales/en.json b/locales/en.json
index 4582b71b9..124bd79d3 100644
--- a/locales/en.json
+++ b/locales/en.json
@@ -290,6 +290,7 @@
     "good_practices_about_user_password": "You are now about to define a new user password. The password should be at least 8 characters long—though it is good practice to use a longer password (i.e. a passphrase) and/or to a variation of characters (uppercase, lowercase, digits and special characters).",
     "group_already_exist": "Group {group} already exists",
     "group_already_exist_on_system": "Group {group} already exists in the system groups",
+    "group_already_exist_on_system_but_removing_it": "Group {group} already exists in the system groups, but YunoHost will remove it…",
     "group_created": "Group '{group}' created",
     "group_creation_failed": "Could not create the group '{group}': {error}",
     "group_cannot_edit_all_users": "The group 'all_users' cannot be edited manually. It is a special group meant to contain all users registered in YunoHost",
diff --git a/src/yunohost/user.py b/src/yunohost/user.py
index fdcac658d..34b367d7d 100644
--- a/src/yunohost/user.py
+++ b/src/yunohost/user.py
@@ -576,7 +576,11 @@ def user_group_create(operation_logger, groupname, gid=None, primary_group=False
     # Validate uniqueness of groupname in system group
     all_existing_groupnames = {x.gr_name for x in grp.getgrall()}
     if groupname in all_existing_groupnames:
-        raise YunohostError('group_already_exist_on_system', group=groupname)
+        if primary_group:
+            logger.warning('group_already_exist_on_system_but_removing_it', group=groupname)
+            subprocess.check_call("sed --in-place '/^%s:/d' /etc/group" % groupname, shell=True)
+        else:
+            raise YunohostError('group_already_exist_on_system', group=groupname)
 
     if not gid:
         # Get random GID